I am uneasy about that “dream ticket” being touted by some Democrats. Bill Clinton, for one, argued recently that Hillary and Barack Obama would be an “almost unstoppable” combination. The way he sees it, Hillary would attract all the poor, unschooled white folks and Barack would attract the college crowd and African Americans. He didn’t mention Hispanics but by now everybody knows that Hillary’s got the Hispanic vote.

I predicted a few blogs ago that the Denocratic Party brass would try to rig a ticket with Hillary for President and Barack for vice president. The concept is simple: Hillary gets eight years, Barack gets eight more and the Democratic Party gets 16 years in the White House. Whoopee!

But maybe not so whoopee. If Barack went for a deal like that, skeptics (like me) would smirk and shake their heads. They would see it as evidence that Barack’s call for a new kind of politics was just so much hot air, that he was as much of an old-style politician as the Bush-league crowd he’s trying to replace.

And Hillary would be proved right. Barack would be nothing more than a charming speech maker, in the tradition of the great snake oil salesmen of yesteryear. That’s the guy she wants as vice president? The one who would be “a heartbeat away from the presidency”? We skeptics might decide not to vote, after all.

Besides, while the Hillary-Barack combination would have twice the appeal of either candidate, it would also have twice the liability. The ticket would turn off both the anti-woman voters and the anti-black voters. And, please don’t try to tell me there aren’t a lot of those voters in America.